EARLY NEW ZEALAND

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 82, 3 October 1936, Page 28

EARLY NEW ZEALAND

STORY OF J. W. STACK

MISSIONARY AND MAORI

(By "Quivis.")

The good work that certain publishers in New Zealand are doing for the literature of this country by an active quest for early historical manuscripts is well exampled by a new volume of Canon Stack's memories from the Dunedin and Wellington house of Messrs. A. H. and A. W. Reed, under the title of "More Maoriland Adventures of J. W. Stack," a continuation of the "Early Maoriland Adventures" which appeared last year. Many readers will know of Stack's "The Sacking of Kaiapohia," describing the siege and capture of Kaiapoi by Te Eauparaha in 1831, one of the classics of New Zealand history; few knew much about the author himself until Mr. A. W. Reed succeeded in obtaining some additional manuscripts of Stack and, by exhaustive inquiry, a great deal of most interesting material about his life, which he presented as an introductory memoir to the "Early Adventures." The publication of these two works, ."Early Adventures" and "More Adventures," constitutes a genuine event in our literary history. These adventures of one of our pioneer missionaries are not only absorbing in themselves, but they contribute valuable fresh material to our knowledge of an infinitely precious period in the story of New Zealand, those heroic days of missionary and Maori that heralded the dawn of antipodean civilisation. :

James West Stack was a New Zealander born, one of the first of our native white New Zealanders, born in 1835, five years before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed,! in the Maori pa of! Puriri' on the fringe of the most turbulent and savage Maori country in New Zealand at the most ferocious period of inter-tribal wars. His father, James Stack, was one of Marsden's missionaries. In his early twenties' he had.a taste of ,the violent and capricious nature of one Maori tribe when the Wesleyan mission station at Whangaroa in 1827 had to be vacated under circumstances of grave danger to all. Later, James Stack went to England, married a young and beautiful girl, still in her teens,, joined the Church Missionary Society, and left again for - New Zealand in 1833. He was posted to the mission station at Mangapouri, in the Waikato, and here just a century ago, with his colleague, the Rev. James Hamlin and Mrs. Hamlin, Stack and his young wife and their child in arms were exposed to such treatment by the tribe which had asked for a missionary to be sent, that the station had to be abandoned and the heathen left to his darkness. There were Maoris' and Maoris in those days; not all were noble savages. The next field of endeavour for this pioneer missionary and his devoted young wife, with their increasing family, was Tauranga and the East Coast districts down to Poverty Bay. Here young James Stack spent his childhood and early boyhood, seldom seeing another white child, until the health of his .father, under the excessive strain of work and worry, compelled a retirement to Auckland, where the lad was one of the first pupils in St. John's College, established by Bishop Selwyn to be a centre of light and learning for the infant colony. From Auckland, owing to continued ill health, the elder Stack had in 1847 to remove to Sydney with his family and not long afterwards to sail for England again. SOJOURN IN ENGLAND. All this is told in the "Early Adventures " The new volume opens with the departure of the Stack family from Sydney in the barque Penyard Park for London. On the voyage home young Stack, who had a liking for the sea, used to go aloft with the sailors to work the sails. The account of fee boy's life in London in the late forties is most interesting. It was the London of Dickens and Stack records the publication, of "David Copperfield" in weekly parts. He spent four years in England and, as the eldest of the family, had a new burden of responsibility thrust upon him on the death of .his mother in 1850. It was his greatest sorrow. In 1851, at the age of 16, his mind was recalled to his native land by a meeting with Tamihana te Rauparaha, who, on the death of his father the celebrated warrier, had come Vto England to endeavour to see Queen Victoria. Young Stack found him disconsolate in a London boardinghouse, a stranger in a strange land unable to speak or to understand the language. He was so glad to meet somebody who knew Maori that he kept Stack listening until late in the night. Stack always regretted to his dying day that he missed, through difr KeTthe chance of acting as interoreter in the interview between the Queen and the Maori chief, "was perhaps this meeting that proved the turnSg point in Stack's life, for he thought of the Native companions of his early boyhood, inspired him to decide to follow, in his father's footsteps, the .career of a missionary among the Maoris. So in 1852 he sailed, at the- age of 17 for New Zealand again in the Slams Castle. Fellow-passengers included not only Tamihana te Bauparaha, but several persons who later achieved prominent positions in New Zealana. There were also many Scottish emigrants for the new Otago settlement. They made port in Otago Harbour and saw the infant township of Dunedin. There Stack, with Tamihana, met the chiefs Taiaroa, Karetai, and Topi, historic names in the early contact of pakeha and Maori. It was then tha* Stack realised through this friendly meeting of former enemies what Christianity had done for the Maori race. The next stage in the voyage,is Poit Nicholson, reached only after grave peril of shipwreck in Palhser Bay a notorious graveyard of ships. Wellington is described as then "a very in-significant-looking town,' with a Maori pa at either end and a few European houses in between. Tamihana invited Stack, Major Richardson, and Mr. Pearson to his house at Otaki, of which there is an interesting description. This had been Te Kauparaha's own house. Here, lor the information of Mr. Reed, the editor of these volumes, it may be worth while to add that the house, with its carvings, survived until the period of the Great War, when unfortunately it was destroyed by fire. Happily, seyeral valuable relics were preserved, including the original .water colour sketches of Te Rauparaha, one in Native costume and the other in the naval uniform which he wore, when a prisoner on a British warship in Auckland; also Te Rauparaha's meres and«taiahas, actually used in warfare; andhthe fine oil paintings of Tamihana and his wife Ruth, mentioned in : Stack's memoirs. These relics were bequeathed by Tamihana to his stepnephew, the late James Howard Wallace; and are now in the possession, I believe, of members of the Wallace family. Tamihana's books and papers,

including correspondence relating to his visit to England, are, I understand, possibly with a few exceptions, lost. THE WAIKATO AND WAR. But this is digressing far from the adventures of James West Stack, who passed from Wellington to Auckland and began his life work as a teacher of the Maoris with Archdeacon Maunsell, who had established himself at Waikato Heads in 1836 and moved Iht mission some miles inland to Kohanga in 1853. This period of Stack's life is fully told. It was here that he met his future wife and from here that he bade farewell to his Maori friends in 1859 to take up the care of souls among the South Island Maoris, with headquarters at Kaiapoi. It was then the eve of the outbreak of the Maori Wars which largely undid the life-work of the missionaries. With few exceptions, these, who knew the Native best, believed the Maoris had right on their side. Stack was one of these. He says (page 184): Before the Waikato Maoris lost their faith in the English, they tried hard to discover some way of reconciling the conflicting interests of the two races who now occupied the country. There were many clever men among the chiefs of Waikato. and if their efforts to solve the difficulties of:the political situation between the English and Maori people had been seconded by the colonists, no war would have ever broken out between them, i Some of my most interesting experiences during the seven years I spent in Waikato were conversations I had with noted chiefs on the subject of local self government. All they wanted was to be treated as fairly as the English were, and allowed some form of local selfgovernment. The modern view of the tragic end of a promising experiment in the civilisation of a noble native race agrees with this. One would like to quote some of the stories and anecdotes of the Maoris, notably that of Hoani Huki, who sat at the door of the church of his people in lifelong penitence, (never daring to enter, because he had' used the leaves of a prayer book as wadding for bullets in a critical battle (pp. 156-7). There is no space, except to add that "More Adventures" like its predecessor, apart from the intrinsic interest of this simply-told story, is a well-edited, wellprinted, and well-produced book. a credit to all concerned, and an earnest, all readers will trust, of more good things to come.